Hi Friends,
First off, thanks for your patience. It’s been a while, but I plan to be on a more regular posting schedule now. Two big updates for you before I start.
(1) While I may not have written much in the past few months, I did contribute to the making of this child:
So, that’s pretty cool and better than any article I could write.
(2) My goal with The User is Content is to unwarp society for you. I want it to be a valuable and self-aware addition to the disgusting gluttonous orgy of information we’re all fucking about in every single day. I like doing it—even if I know it’s sometimes just hot takes. It means a lot to me that 700+ people subscribe and read my posts. To keep things consistent and post more routinely, I’m going to start charging for my Substack. Existing readers get access for $11.11/year, and this price is good forever. This offer only lasts a week, and then prices go up to $44.44/year. There will still be free content here and there but most of it will be paywall.
I love writing for you all, and I also love making the podcast versions of the posts. I hope to create more dynamic content—podcasts, videos, guest posts, and interviews.
I will pray in gratitude for each paid subscription and donate 10% of my proceeds to a radical non-profit every year—probably indigenous lead organizations (I will let you know).
Love you, thank you!!
Now, for the main attraction, Kids with Guns. As almost always, it was inspired by a conversation with my wife, who now has her own Substack—subscribe so she feels the pressure to actually post.
KIDS WITH GUNS
The other day, I was at a party, a bit worn out from a stressful time getting there with my kids. I was leaning against a wall enjoying my Mezcal with grapefruit juice when a kid popped around the corner with a giant Nerf rifle and proceeded to unload on me. The gun was empty, so it just made clicking noises. But my nervous system still felt each one.
I was taken back to Daytona Beach circa 2003. I was 14 years old, visiting my sister who was at college there. She had some friends over who—how can I say this—looked like they had seen some shit in their lives. I had a Nerf gun, or it might have been a cap gun, I pointed at one of her friends in jest. He immediately reached across the table, grabbed the barrel and slammed it down on the table, and said sternly, “Never point a fucking gun at someone’s head, even as a joke.” I was scared, and bit scarred, as was his intention. Until writing this post, I had always thought, “What a loser that guy was. He overreacted. I was just a kid with a toy gun.” But as I recollect the experience now, I’m grateful he had the wherewithal to remind me what a gun is and what it represents.
Now, as the figurative table had turned two decades later at a house party, I was the one ready to overreact as I had a toy gun pointed at my head. I think of anti-feminist feminist writer Camile Paglia pontificating about the mental world men must live in. She writes, “Male urination really is a kind of accomplishment, an arc of transcendence. A woman merely waters the ground she stands on.” She goes on to explain that, multiple times a day, men piss on something. They point their members at something, and they piss on it. To piss on something is even an idiom for degrading or insulting someone or something. To operate within my male body, I must piss on something, and with this natural biological need, like it or not, comes all the associations with pissing on something.
And it’s no secret there is a deep symbolic relationship between a gun and a cock. So, amongst friends and family, this boy was going around with his symbolic piss and bullets, just showering strangers with whatever was motivating him that morning.
Why can’t kids have toy dildos?
When I was two years old, I moved from Montreal, Canada to Orlando, Florida. My dad recalls the first time we went to the beach (Daytona Beach again probably!!), and I was running around naked. He got a dose of repressed and confused US culture when someone approached him and said to put some clothes on me because it was inappropriate. My dad rightly responded, “If a naked child makes you uncomfortable, you need to get the hell away from my family.”
American culture has this warped, gas-lighty, confused sort of repression. This man, out of deep fear of pedophilia—perhaps his own, perhaps just general sexual repression—accused my dad and I of doing something unsavory, rude, or disgusting by just being naked. Of course, he was the only one there sexualizing a child. This also happened at a hotel recently in Los Angeles. My 2-year-old son was running naked, and the waitress told me, “I might put clothes on him; there could be pedophiles around. I would hate if pictures of him ended up on the internet.” Again, acting with what she surely thought was motherly instinct, she was the only one actively sexualizing my child.
So, with 2023 barely halfway through, we have had over 200 mass shooting events in the US. We wonder what the problem is. I promise you it’s not that too many kids are naked at the swimming hole.
No, the problem is that our culture—not our politicians, not our media (don’t blame anyone but you and your immediate community)— is more self-conscious about a boy simply being naked than they are about a fully clothed boy running around a party and unloading bullets on strangers. I’m so ready for this not to be okay anymore. I just chuckled at this kid, but I should have grabbed the gun and told him never to fucking point a gun at another person, even as a joke.
It’s funny. I wanted to write this section about why kids can’t have toy dildos, but they can have toy guns, but the analogy didn’t work out because all dildos are toys, They are usually soft and nicely colored. But if a kid were running around a party flopping a dildo around, it would be (after some nervous laughter) immediately put to an end. The mom or dad would come running out screaming in embarrassment.
But kids running around with guns is just the usual background noise of a party in America—it even makes a parent proud. And then, every time there is a shooting, Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans blame the shooter, and no one introspects how they have all contributed to desensitizing themselves to violence. Reminds me of all the mindless liberals who laughed their way through season after season of The Apprentice as Donald Trump made numerous jokes about running for president and then accused the Republicans of creating a monster. It’s like some of y’all think life isn’t real.
Perhaps we are giving kids (and ourselves) conflicting messages. How can school shootings be bad but running around with guns and shooting your friends for fun be good? I’m reminded of Amy Schumer’s skit about how, on some level, rape and football go hand in hand:
I’m not saying kids should have toy dildos at the next block party, but they should definitely have toy dildos before they have toy guns.
Big League Chew
Thankfully it’s been phased out, but I grew up munching on Big League Chew and candy cigarettes. Candy cigarettes are now banned. But do you think toy guns will ever be banned? Feels unlikely in my lifetime. Why does it feel like such a stretch? Why are candy cigarettes illegal but actual cigarettes are legal? Again, we are policing children with our shame rather than our loving awareness.
When will we realize that we were all children once and kind of still are?
All we wanted was to be cuddled and listened to; we wanted to learn about sex and the body without shame; we wanted to experience drinking and cigarettes and also learn about how bad they were for us without all the charged and confusing mixed messages from the movies and dad’s hidden pack of cigarettes. Instead, we step into a quagmire of culture marred with adult children reeling from their own traumatic childhoods, self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes, watching violent movies, and attempting to raise a generation better than them.
But the biggest lie of parenting is that it should be “do as I say, not as I do.” That’s not how it works. Kids do as we do, not as we say. And that is not because they are rebellious; it’s because that is how the human brain and the nervous system work. Unconsciously, it learns from our parents, regardless of the inane messages that might be communicated on the surface level. What you say does not matter; all that matters is what you condone and do with your own body—the rest is window dressing.
None of this is new; it’s in the culture already; you must make it conscious and start practicing peace in your community. Here’s your soundtrack for the day:
Protect Yourself
So how about we stop trying to protect the innocence of our children and start protecting our own innocence? We are just children moving through the passage of time. There is no inner child—that’s just a metaphor—there is just you, and we’re all still children in our deepest, rawest parts. Every school shooter would rather be cuddling. Every sad smoker would rather be kissed on the forehead and told they are perfect. We should always do what we would rather be doing and give others the freedom to do the same.
Do you want to be desensitized to mistreatment and violence? Or do you want to harness your sensitivity and work to make your community and family as sensitive as possible? Insensitivity results in violence to yourself and others.
“Oh, you're just being sensitive.” “Don’t be so sensitive.”
We are moving from the age of Intent Over Impact to Impact Over Intent. No one cares if you didn’t mean to be racist, and no one cares if you meant no offense—the fact is offense was caused. Does that mean you must rearrange your entire life and language so that everyone you interact with is not offended by you or your words? Should that kid feel bad for pointing a toy gun at me? Should his parents feel bad? No, not at all, unless they want to. And the only way to know if they want to is by speaking up kindly. Communicating your feelings is the only way to bring up your community’s latent desires.
At that moment, if I could have expressed my sensitivity to the gun and how it made me feel, I could have given that kid and his parents the opportunity to be honest about their own feelings. I wouldn’t be surprised if they agreed that pointing a gun at someone is probably not fun. Maybe they’d put the gun away for the duration of the party, but the next time they saw their kid playing with it, they might have permission to feel their feelings about the killing machine in their closet. Or, they might tell me not to be so sensitive and blow me off. And that would be good information for me about my community.
The lesson is, I’ve got to learn to be sensitive to my own needs, and I need to surround myself with people who are sensitive to my needs. But—and this is a huge but—the only way to assemble that community is to vocalize my feelings and sensitivities and allow people to respond. The onus is on me.
Okay, this microdose is hitting harder than expected. Thanks for reading. Love you, have a good week.
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As always, I end my posts with a picture of my breakfast and my children:
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